Covering a Nuclear Leak and Bullshit Writing

The readings for this week were the Assessment of Media Performance of the Three Mile Island event, Politics and English Language and Five Characteristics of Academic or Scholarly Prose.
The assessment of media performance of the three mile island was very interesting, specially since in class we had a fake news conference on the same emergency and then had to write about it. It really gave me the perspective that the reporters had when they had to report about the nuclear leak. The chapter hit on a few major topics: the importance of numerous sources, sensationalism, and understanding the technical scientific part of the emergency. I really liked how the journalists that were interviewed stressed that it was very important to interview more than one person or company for a story as big as the Three Mile Island. The journalists were not about to believe everything the company told them and that is very smart. Of course the nuclear plant does not want the public to know that the nuclear leak was a bigger deal than they were trying to make it seem. It was the journalists' duty to give the public all the information they could find on the topic and display it in a non-basis way. However, some journalists went too far and made the story much bigger than it should have. This usually happens with a story that is so competitive, there is alot of pressure to have the best story. The one aspect that I liked that the chapter mentioned was that the journalist had to deal with all the scientific information about nuclear plants. That is where I was lost when I had to write the story for class on Three Mile Island. As a journalist major I never even took chemistry so I was very confused about the whole workings of nuclear elements (or whatever its called, see I really do not understand science). I imagine that the real reporters of the Three Mile Island felt similar. In a situation like that I would have called up any nuclear experts I could find to have them figure it out and have them be my sources.

The other two readings talked about scholarly writing and the excess of words that many people use to convey a message. The whole time I was thinking about my friends and how when they have to write an essay for a class and they do not have any idea what to write they say "Well, I can just bullshit it." Pretty much meaning, they will just talk around the topic with lots of huge scholarly sounding words. This however just does not work in journalism because the purpose of journalism is to report facts to the public on news. Being concise is very much stressed in this field of writing and you just cannot publish "bullshit." I really liked George Orwell's quote "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."